12.10.14

BONNIE RAITT, December 1975

This was the
interview in which Bonnie raved about Little Feat, though I didn’t use those
quotes in my Melody Maker piece as everyone raved about Little Feat
and it seemed superfluous to requirements. She got quite girly talking about
Lowell George, admitting that her and Linda (Ronstadt) would do ‘anything’ to
get him to play on their records. I never quite established what ‘anything’
was, but from the look on her face I don’t think it was cleaning his apartment.

Bonnie Raitt juggled happily between the various
lines on the desk telephone in an office at Warner Brothers’ New York
headquarters. She seemed to be relaying premature Christmas greetings to people
who lived some distance away, and the Warner Brothers telephone enabled her to
make all these expensive calls at no personal cost.

She
giggled guiltily but chatted away regardless. Her father, John Raitt, had just
left the office, the two of them having lunched together with a writer from the New
York Daily News who was doing a joint interview with father and
daughter.

John
Raitt, strikingly good-looking despite his years, is a Broadway musical comedy
singer of some renown, a Scottish-descended Quaker and, in his own circles, a
celebrity.

Bonnie
Raitt, by some curious quirk of fate, is
a 26-year-old blues singer who takes the blues very seriously, has strong
political convictions, and could become a very hot property for Warner Brothers
in 1976.

A “hot
property” is hardly the term Bonnie would use, but the company must be hoping
for a return on their investment by now. She’s been making albums since 1971,
but they haven’t sold particularly well. A massive tour just completed,
however, the tide is turning at last.

Bonnie
Raitt has long red hair and an infectious enthusiasm for music. While once she
played second on the bill in clubs to veteran black blues players, she now uses
her position to expose these same musicians to the wider audience she is
gathering. Any form of injustice rankles her, especially injustice towards
black US bluesmen.

She
became a blues freak at college, collecting records and switching her
folk-style guitar playing towards the blues. She also met Dick Waterman, now
her manager, another blues freak who had connections with the artists. Through
him Bonnie had access to her idols on record.

Their
close relationship lasted for three years, and during that time Bonnie’s
musical life took over from her college studies. To make money on the side, she
began singing in clubs, and her free time was spent with Waterman, visiting
festivals and hanging out with characters like Fred McDowell, Buddy Guy, Junior
Wells, Arthur Crudup and Son House.

“They thought it was kinda
funny that this 19-year-old girl with red hair was playing guitar with them. I
was eating it up. I don’t mean to boast but I could play everything from the
records,” she said.

Bonnie admits that she was
rather lucky to be in the right place at the right time, not only to meet her
idols but also to play clubs and, quite soon afterwards, concerts.

“Most women who were around didn’t play blues
guitar, they played folk music, but I could do ballads and blues and James
Taylor songs and Joni Mitchell, whatever... guess I could open a show for Fred
McDowell or James Taylor without threatening either one of them.

“Someone like Linda Ronstadt
or Tracy Nelson needs a whole band, so they were bound to be more expensive
than me. I was just an all-round opening act, and gradually it was obvious that
music would take over from college.”

Nevertheless, Bonnie was not,
and still isn’t, a singer-songwriter. She’s tried recording a few of her own
songs, but mainly she relies on others for material. There was no lack of it
when it came to recording her first album, and she was happy to go with Warners
because their label included many of her favourite acts: Randy Newman, Taylor,
Little Feat and Ry Cooder.

“What I’ve tried to do is base
my career on live performances, starting out as an opening act in a small club
and working up to being a main act in a club, then opening concerts, and then
working back up again to closing concerts. For the last five years I’ve put out
a record every summer and toured in the autumn.

“I’m not aiming for any kind
of commercially successful record and, thank God, Warners have been very
understanding about that. I think I could have put out a commercial single
already, but I don’t want one. If you have one and don’t have another, then you
are washed up. Whatever your hit is, that is what you are expected to do, and I
do lots of different things.

“Right now I think maybe I’m
at a point where I wouldn’t mind a little commercial success, but I’m not sure.
I guess I’m where I want to be, even though the tour I’ve just done didn’t sell
out everywhere. One gold record might change that and that would mean I didn’t
have to tour quite so much as I do now. I guess I’m getting a little tired from
touring for eight months out of the year.”

Bonnie listens to thousands of
songs before choosing material to record. She is deluged with unsolicited
material from amateur songwriters, but she tends to take material from writers
she knows personally. “I think I listened to over 300 tapes before the last
album, and with five songs to a tape that’s a lot of listening. I didn’t use
any of them.

“Usually it’s someone I know
calling up and saying, ‘Listen, I think I’ve got something for you’. It’s
getting harder to find material, though. For my first two albums I did songs
that were in my repertoire, things that I’d always wanted to do, but by the
third I had problems.”

The third album, Takin’
My Time, caused many problems for her and, in fact, she recorded it twice.
First time with Lowell George, of Little Feat, which didn’t work out right, and
then with John Hall, of Orleans. The delays resulted in Bonnie going well over
budget, which meant Warners were calling the shots for her fourth, Streetlights.
The company insisted that Bonnie use a proven producer and she came up with
Jerry Ragovoy, the veteran R&B producer at New York’s Hit Factory.

“They had me over a barrel
there and insisted that I did my next album, which I owed them, with a producer
who had had a hit rather than one of my friends. I liked Ragovoy and so I chose
him, but that’s the first time I’ve ever let myself be produced. I loved Jerry
and I loved the material and I loved the musicians, but I don’t think it’s me.”

Five recorded songs – two on
her first album and three on the second – have been written by Bonnie, but she
writes on the piano and, because of touring hasn’t had the time or inclination
to carry on. “I don’t consider myself a songwriter. I’m not going to record my
own songs just for the sake of it, just because they are my own.

“It’s getting harder finding
songs because there are so many others looking around... Linda Ronstadt, Maria
Muldaur, Tracy Nelson, Rita Coolidge, Anne Murray, Emmylou Harris – the list
goes on and on of other women interpreters.”

Bonnie spends much of her time
with the other girl singers. Three years ago she moved back to Los Angeles from
Cambridge. “It’s like Paris in the Thirties out there – Joni, Maria, Linda and
everybody. We’re all close friends and get together a lot.”

Bonnie is, nevertheless,
firmly anti-star in her outlook on the music industry but realises that if she
wants to do benefit concerts for things she believes in, then she must achieve
some kind of success. A dilemma.

“I do benefits now,” she said.
“I am very much involved with the Womens’ Movement, but the only time you can
do benefits is when you are successful enough to be a headliner. That’s why I
toured so much. People have said I’m crazy to go on the road the way I do, but
when I can headline on my own then I can be in a position to put older blues
people on the bill with me, the people that I used to open up for. My two best
friends from the old blues musicians, Fred McDowell and Arthur Crudup, have
died. That’s my main ambition. If
you asked me why I am doing this with my life, then that’s it – to use my
influence to turn people’s heads onto these people. If I can really sell out
halls, then I have a lot of influence about who is on the bill with me. I got
my music from these people so I should be supporting them.”